I have avoided claiming any expertise on the COVID pandemic. I am not a medical specialist, nor an epidemiologist. That said, I do have some unique experience to apply to all this, since I happened to be working on an unrelated project for the Secretary of Health and Human Services late in 2001 though my retirement from government service in 2003.
That is an odd place for a career intelligence analyst to wind up, but the times made it related. We were attempting to work whole-of-government solutions in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 11 September, 2001. That crisis was still unfolding into what we came to know as the GWOT, or the “Global War on Terror.”
It is interesting to be writing about it now. Our Nation’s newest longest war (Afghanistan) appears to be replicating the end of another long war in SE Asia. You may remember that one. Long lines of anxious people lined up at the US Embassy in Saigon, climbing steps hoping to catch a lift to anywhere but there. I got an ironic note that some of the same anxiety is being felt at the Embassy in Kabul today.
Twenty years ago, that is where the story got even more interesting. It was 16 November 2002. The Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak was first identified in the town of Foshan in Guangdong Province in China. This was of more direct relevance to the HHS mission than the ones associated with the actions of highly motivated Wahabi terrorists. They were arguably sick, but not in the way HHS was specialized to address. Everyone standing around on the Secretary’s personal staff was enlisted to support the mobilization against an actual disease.
I was a bureaucrat for that, but as a Soviet Submarine Analyst in my past career, I found a strange commonality with some of the epidemiologists I was working with on the New Crisis. Tracking the spread of disease was similar in some regards to tracking submarines concealed by deep water. The Experts came from the amazing variety of government health organizations and Agencies, Army to teaching hospitals. To make order from the agglomeration, a veteran medical expert was chosen to lead the response from the NIH. It was a guy named Dr. Anthony Fauci.
I may not be a medical professional, but I have been in several organizational responses to external crises. So, I was of some use in organizational issues and response, and as such wound up in a lot of meetings with the same medical people who ran our response to SARS-2, the dread COVID virus. I am safe down at the farm, but there are things happening now that were almost identical to what was considered back in SARS response. Let me refresh you on the details of that.
Over 8,000 people from 29 different countries and territories were infected. Worldwide death toll was 774 after the eight month course of the disease. I recall one meeting in which the discussion of “quarantine” came up. Dr. Fauci outlined some of the possibilities in responding to something that had the potential to explode into a pandemic. I offered an opinion, and the Doctor was kind in dismissing my support for what he called “the Q-word.” He went on to explain the many aspects of a working society that would be disrupted in use of lock-downs. He was gentle- to me-in his assessment of the folly in overreaction but dismissive of the potential for a good result.
The Department declared the epidemic “over” in accordance with the World Health Organization on July 5th, 2003 and therein ended any personal insight into the amazing panoply of Public Health in emergency. I can tell you though, interest in SARS, how it worked and how to stop it, was a common topic and it had some baggage. President Dick Nixon had ended the US biological weapons program in 1969, and by 1973 all offensive research was halted in accordance with a UN resolution submitted to the Senate for ratification. In those terms, there were provisions to be ready, just in case, and some “defensive” research continued. In other HHS business prior to retirement, we dealt with the anthrax threat- the “white powder” often mentioned in those days. There was significant opposition to anything related to bioweapons, and I can understand why the matter was handled as an off-shore enterprise.
With my retirement from Government service, interest in things biologic (apart from my own personal ones) faded. I had happily not thought about biological agents in more than a decade. Until 2019, anyway.
I had a hospital stay at the end of 2019. I do not recall a lot about it, but my son later said the matter had come up in discussions about prolonging my life. If you haven’t thought about the idea that someone might be summoned into your affairs and have to deal with the rat’s nest of papers, resources and titles of your life, I recommend some basic preparation for the unexpected.
My son had been assigned overseas a while back. I remembered the urgency we felt before deployment, and the importance of having things straight in case something happened a long way from family. In one of my more lucid moments before he departed for Asia, I suggested we do a drill and fill out some useful paperwork. That included things like powers of attorney and medical crap, just in case. In the last stack of papers was a form marked “Do Not Resuscitate Directive.”
We both filled one out, in light of the old family story about the medical intervention on our Aunt Rhoda. She was Dean of Nursing at U-M and her rescue was a multi-year and staggeringly expensive experiment that resulted in a semi-conscious Rhoda who was provided an unread copy of the New York Times on her bed each morning. It departed the same way. I filled out the form for me as “DNR.”
At some point in my more recent encounter with the business end of medicine, the ER docs asked my son if they could intubate me. That was December 2019. My son produced the DNR I had signed, and the medical people backed off. I recovered, mostly, in January of 2020. I remember being conscious in the hospital and hearing about COVID on the television. All the old SARS recollections came back, and I began to agitate for recuperation at The Farm.
The latest tumult about the Wuhan Lab, the one about who knew what when and who picked up the tab suggests the virus was already here. Intubation, the insertion of tubes down the throat and into the lungs, was the recommended treatment from Chinese sources. Through the recovery process, I thought I might very well have had the virus, but you remember that nothing made much sense, day to day, and I never followed up with a test for exposure, since the story then was that the COVID virus wasn’t here, intubation was good and necessary, and we either had to wear masks or not.
The matter of intubation had its issues as well, some of them fatal, though they were below the fold on the crisis reporting. I got to thinking about it yesterday when a pal mentioned casually that she was ready for another round of emergency rule with the emergence of the COVID Delta variant virus now being floated in the media.
I am not. My passing experience at the senior level of public health emergency management suggests strongly that the measures used in the pandemic are more political than medical in nature. The Expert person who best expressed the profound and damaging potential of the disruption to me at the time was Dr. Tony Fauci. He knows about this stuff. And he also is now a political doctor.
So, my inclination to view our next crisis as a political one rather than just a public health matter, you know why. It is both, and the decision to play it this way comes with perfect knowledge of what was going to happen. And will likely happen again.
Copyright 2021 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com